An Inside Look at the British Fashion Awards

The prize could well have been for Best-kept Fashion Secret of the Year—meaning, of course, the triumph of the closely guarded mystery of Catherine Middleton’s royal wedding dress, which was revealed on April 29, 2011 to such global astonishment and approval to be an Alexander McQueen. But at Monday night’s British Fashion Awards in London, the honor was called Designer of the Year, and it was awarded, and rightly so, to Sarah Burton. “This feels like the icing on the cake,” she said as she received the trophy from the prime minister’s wife, Samantha Cameron.

Truly, 2011 has been a big year for British fashion—what with that wedding dress and a stellar set of shows from London’s rising stars—and now there’s even more to live up to with the London Olympics and even more royal-family pageantry in the offing for 2012. In fact, some members of the audience had already been to Buckingham Palace earlier Monday evening to mingle with Her Majesty, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall as a prequel to next year’s royal celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee—her 60th year on the throne.

Over at the Art Deco Savoy Hotel Theatre, it was the women of fashion who swept nearly every prize. Sarah Burton was only the last of a stream of British creative female forces to stand and be honored. Marc Jacobs handed the Designer Brand of the Year award to his friend (and sometime model) Victoria Beckham, who was genuinely overwhelmed and teary (she’d beaten out Burberry, Tom Ford, and Stella McCartney, after all) as she thanked her husband, David, “because without him, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I’m doing.” Mary Katrantzou, whose brilliant way with prints (or as she calls it, “painting with pixels”) won the prize for Emerging Talent of the Year (ready-to-wear). Vogue contributing editor and designer Tabitha Simmons (who was wearing a Chanel haute couture peplum-jacketed pencil skirt suit just like Lady Amanda Harlech, as it happened) arrived with her husband, the photographer Craig McDean (who’s also British) to receive the Emerging Talent of the Year (in accessories) for her dainty, directional shoe collections.

Kate Moss, sashaying about in a vintage fishnet dress, presented the Isabella Blow award for Fashion Creator of the Year to show producer Sam Gainsbury in a special recognition of her outstanding contribution to the staging of the record-breaking exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this summer (“Lee taught me nothing is impossible,” she said). Another young shoe entrepreneur, Charlotte Dellal, won the Accessory Designer of the Year award for her Charlotte Olympia collection. When it came to the red carpet award, McCartney, wearing a micro-geometric-print silk jumpsuit, leapt up to take the trophy from her friend Kate Hudson, who teased the designer with an anecdote about how, when Hudson was 21, Stella had sewn her into a dress for her first awards event—and she ended up on every worst dressed list for the 2001 Academy Awards the very next day. Not a mistake McCartney’s been making lately with Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Nicole Kidman all walking red carpets across the globe in her dresses just in the last couple of weeks.

Alexa Chung, wearing a Christopher Kane jewel-encrusted shift that she warned the audience from the podium she was going to steal—was handed the British Style award after snagging first place in a nationwide poll, and Stella Tennant (in a Céline tux jumpsuit by Phoebe Philo) accepted the Model of the Year title from Vogue photographer David Sims for her dazzling ad campaigns and editorials by thanking everyone who makes her look good. “I like your lighting, David!” she exclaimed.

It wasn’t quite a clean sweep for the girls, though. Christopher Kane won the New Establishment award, and SirPaul Smith was bestowed the Outstanding Achievement in Fashion award, but for those who keep tallies of such things, this was an unprecedented evening of recognition for a swath of British creative women of all kinds across the fashion industry for their talent and entreprenuership. Since 1989, women designers have only won the top British fashion award six times—four, actually, since Phoebe Philo and Dame Vivienne Westwood have won it twice. But for this new, bankable generation—women in their 20s and 30s who have risen in the ranks while successfully managing their creative work, businesses, and family lives in the last decade—the theme of the evening emerged in their acceptance speeches. McCartney put it best: “This is for my home team and my work team,” she said. “Because without you, I just couldn’t do any of it.”